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Qumran—The Pottery Factory

Dead Sea Scrolls Not Related to Settlement, Says Excavator

By Hershel Shanks

Qumran, that desolate, supposedly monastery-like site with its ritual baths and communal dining room overlooking the Dead Sea, had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls found in nearby caves, according to a just-released study. Your vision of a couple hundred celibate Essenes padding around praying whenever they were not copying scrolls in a special room designated “the scrollery,” only to end up buried in a silent cemetery of more than a thousand single graves, is a work of the imagination, not history or archaeology, says Israeli archaeologist Yizhak Magen.a Qumran, he says, was just a pottery factory, […]

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Footnotes

1.

The report is co-authored by Magen’s long-time colleague, archaeologist Yuval Peleg, and appears in Katharina Galor, Jean-Baptiste Humbert and Jurgen Zangenberg, eds., The Site of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Archaeological Interpretations and Debates (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 55–113.

2.

See Hershel Shanks, “Who Lies Here?” BAR 25:05.

3.

See Boaz Zissu, “Odd Tomb Out: Has Jerusalem’s Essene Cemetery Been Found?” BAR 25:02.

4.

See Oren Gutfeld, “Hyrcania’s Mysterious Tunnels,” in this issue.

Endnotes

1.

Interestingly enough, Magen Broshi, who has also excavated at Qumran and who supports the Essene theory, tells us that “the site lacks…good clay.” Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, s.v. “Qumran.”

2.

By contrast, Magen Broshi argues that 10 of the 16 water installations at the site are mikva’ot. “These ritual baths,” he says, “are perhaps the most important elements identifying the compound as a religious institution.” Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, s.v. “Qumran.” Yet he concedes that six of the water installations, among them the largest, are not ritual immersion pools.

3.

De Vaux dated the famous round cistern to the Iron Age. On this, Magen disagrees.

4.

In “The Early History of the Qumran Community,” in David Noel Freedman and Jonas C. Greenfield, eds., New Directions in Biblical Archaeology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), p. 77.

5.

In “The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Essenes or Sadducees,” in Hershel Shanks, ed., Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 57.